Monthly Archives: September 2013

According to Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Global Brand Building Officer, “Digital Marketing is Dead“. I was recently asked my opinion on this bold statement by the team at Commpro.biz. I provided an op-ed piece that evaluates the commentary tied to the statement and add my perspective on the future of digital marketing.

I received word from the Pinterest team announcing the limited roll-out of promoted pins. At this time this feature is available to a small group of brands for testing, but the groundwork is being laid to support paid amplification of Pinterest content.

“We’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses. I know some of you may be thinking, “Oh great…here come the banner ads.” But we’re determined to not let that happen. While we haven’t figured out all the details, I can say that promoted pins will be:

• Tasteful—No flashy banners or pop-up ads. • Transparent—We’ll always let you know if someone paid for what you see, or where you see it. • Relevant—These pins should be about stuff you’re actually interested in, like a delicious recipe, or a jacket that’s your style. • Improved based on your feedback—Keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make things better.

For our first test, we’ll promote a few pins in search results and category feeds. For example, a pin for a Darth Vader outfit from a costume shop might be promoted in a search for “halloween.” Nobody’s paying for anything yet—we want to see how things go and, more than anything, hear what you think.”

This is an important announcement for brands that leverage Pinterest. Having the ability to amplify content and associate with topics such as “seasons” is a key step to going beyond organic reach and driving additional discoverability within the channel.

Back in May, I attended the first Pinterest Partner Marketing event. During that session one of the items that was revealed was the Pinterest Interest Graph. To recap, an interest graph is an online representation of the specific things in which an individual is interested. And because the focus of Pinterest is based on what people are indexing on the web and then categorizing by interests, the Pinterest Interest Graph is the foundation for their business moving forward especially with today’s promoted pins announcement.

The key to the interest graph for Pinterest is the ability to create personalized experiences that change based on an individuals life stage and interests. The association is less with people and more with things. This may include life events such as marriage, children, etc… and Pinterest hopes that by focusing on interests they are building a sustainable platform that can grow with users over time and continue to provide both utility and relevance based on discovery. Now, with the overlay of promoted pins, Pinterest will have the ability to leverage the data from their Interest graph and map that to a promoted product suite to add value to potential advertisers as well as a model to drive actual revenue.

It will be interesting to track how this will ultimately be rolled out, but the groundwork was announced in May, this is the next step in the evolution of the platform.

My last post talked about the recent Facebook announcement that outlined the new promotional guidelines. Behind the scenes, I was working closely with various internal teams at Facebook over the past two months to better understand the potential impact the changes may have and how to plan for future campaigns.

Based on this information I have written a white paper (available below) that outlines what I am calling the 3 new promotional engagement models that Facebook now supports.

The foundation of each model is tied to aligning the type of brand objective being considered to the ideal engagement model. The models are as follows:

Short Term Engagement Model

News Feed Engagement Model

Sustained Engagement Model

This white paper can be used as a resource when mapping client objectives to the type of promotional engagement model that may be ideal including making the call between an app vs. responsive News feed strategy or how Hashtag promotions differ on Facebook vs. other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram & Vine.

SUMMARY: The biggest change tied to the recent changes are tied to a brands ability to create short burst engagement opportunities with the additional flexibility now afforded to brand pages.

From an innovation and alignment perspective, the News Feed engagement model is directly aligned with where Facebook as a platform and a business are going. This is a mobile first experience that capitalizes on capturing users attention “in-stream” and reaches them across both desktop & mobile.

The final model looks at when to leverage an app based approach as well as key campaign characteristics that would lead to the use of a canvas page or Facebook page tab solution.

BlackFin360 Archives

Tom Edwards, Ad Age Marketing Technology Trailblazer and Chief Digital Officer, Agency @ Epsilon analyzes best practices and points of difference between Google Actions across the Google Assistant ecosystem as well as Amazon Alexa Voice Services.

In this video, Tom compares and contrasts Amazon Alexa Skills with Google Actions and discusses feature differences, outlines best practices associated with deploying skills and actions as well as key points to consider before submitting for final approvals.

Tom also discusses driving skill and action discovery as well as strategic thoughts tied to going beyond tactical utility towards full ecosystem considerations.

In this video, Tom analyzes the new features that are available as well as discusses topics such as the shift towards social messaging, the role of YouTube’s Uptime application and a preview towards the world of immersive co-viewing with YouTube in virtual reality.